Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 168

by Neil Clarke

  Scientists explored the skies, adventurers set travel records, and entertainers captivated crowds by jumping out of balloons and parachuting to the ground. For a time, clothing, hairstyles, and anything that could be painted were modeled after or decorated with balloons. Naturally, ballooning sailed into literature as well, and continued to be a craze well past the Victorian period.

  Ballooning was popular largely because it was rare enough to be exciting and common enough to be just barely accessible—not only to aristocrats and to men—but also to working-class men and women. Exhibition ballooning quickly became a feature at county fairs, where not only could huge audiences see the balloon launch, but also a working-class person stood a chance of buying, winning, or volunteering for a ride. A working-class family could even put together enough capital to build their own balloon and stage exhibition flights for income. It took less than a year for the first woman to go in an untethered balloon (Élisabeth Thible) and countless women followed, as passengers, pilots, and parachutists.

  Balloonists wrote accounts of their travels that were both scientific and adventurous, poetic and factual. Perhaps the first work of prose fiction about ballooning was a lovely work of fantasy written by 1802 by Jeanne-Geneviève Labrosse. She was the first woman to jump from a balloon and descend by parachute. As part of her act, she sometimes tossed her cat out of the balloon with a parachute as well. In response to concerned cat lovers, Madame Garnerin’s cat sent a letter to the press describing his intense love of parachuting. This was only natural, since he had, he stated, “been nursed in the very bosom of aerostation.”

  Meanwhile, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “To a Balloon” and created his own sky lanterns, which bore copies of his essay the “Declaration of Rights.” Scientists and poets alike, including Benjamin Franklin, Erasmus Darwin, and Victor Hugo, wrote of the possibilities of ballooning with a breadth of imagination that bridged the gap between science, scientific romance, and science fiction. The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, first written by Rudolf Erich Raspe in 1785, had several editions, translators, and publishers, each of whom added more and more adventures. In the versions published between 1809 and 1895, the Baron had all manner of balloon-related adventures, including lifting and relocating buildings for his amusement.

  As the Regency era transformed into the Victorian, writers used the concept of hot air ballooning to suggest new possibilities in travel, war, science, and adventure. In the tangled world of publishing, many authors played with similar ideas about balloon travel, some more than once. Edgar Allan Poe published a short story “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” about a man who travels to the moon in a balloon. Subsequently, Poe’s publisher allegedly plagiarized Poe’s story for his own story, “The Great Moon Hoax.” Poe raised the stakes by launching “The Balloon-Hoax,” in which he convinced readers of The New York Sun that a fictional character named Monck Mason traveled across the Atlantic Ocean in only three days.

  Jules Verne borrowed many elements from Poe and referred to “The Balloon-Hoax” in his own book, From the Earth to the Moon. He also turned to a hot air balloon as the main means of conveyance for Five Weeks in a Balloon, or, A Journey of Discovery by Three Englishmen in Africa. This book, though only barely science fiction (the balloon is altered so that it can make long voyages), set the tone for Verne’s subsequent Extraordinary Voyages books.

  Incidentally, Verne’s traveler Phileas Fogg does NOT use a hot air balloon in the book version of Around the World in Eighty Days. In the novel, Fogg travels by rail, boats (mostly steamers), an elephant, and a wind-powered sledge. The balloon was introduced to the story by the 1956 film adaptation and became so popular that it is the first thing most people think of when they hear the book’s title!

  Balloon pilots use their knowledge of air currents for navigation, and skilled pilots can catch different wind currents with surprising precision. However, balloons do not have steering mechanisms. Ballooning changed radically in the 1950s when Ed Yost discovered that balloons could carry their own fuel. Previously, balloons were tethered and the air inside heated, then the balloon was released. The balloon could descend by letting the heated air out, but once that heated air was gone, it could not be replaced until the balloon landed. Yost used kerosene and then propane to heat the air while in flight. Should you go on a recreational balloon flight, the balloon will most likely have a propane burner on board, which allows balloons to descend and then reascend, which allows for longer flights.

  Hot air balloons were eclipsed by airplanes after the Wright Brothers’ flight in 1903. However, it was by no means settled that the future of the air would belong to airplanes. Dirigibles (often called airships) consisted of an envelope, sometimes with a metal frame inside the envelope, along with passenger and/or cargo compartments and an engine and steering mechanisms. They were able to rise into the sky by using hydrogen or helium gasses.

  The most famous dirigibles were built by the Zeppelin company in Germany. Their aircraft were, conveniently, called “Zeppelins,” and sometimes the word was and is used to describe any dirigible with a rigid framework. German Zeppelins bombed Paris and London in WWI. After WWI, passengers took luxurious flights around Europe and from Europe to America aboard the craft. The Graf Zeppelin circumnavigated the globe in 1929. Beginning in 1933, Hitler turned the German dirigibles into a symbol of rising Nazi power. The golden age of Zeppelins and dirigibles ended with the famous Hindenburg disaster of May 6, 1937.

  Thanks to the steampunk genre, dirigibles thrive in literature today. Inspired by Victorian writers H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, steampunk explores the possibilities of alternate histories in which Victorian fashion prevails, steam as an energy source was not replaced by electricity or gasoline, and dirigibles rule the sky.

  It’s difficult to find any steampunk that DOESN’T feature dirigibles, but a few that do demand special mention. In real history, the Union used hot air balloons to spy on the Confederates. In Cherie Priest’s Clementine, dirigibles carry troops, supplies, and spies in a version of the American Civil War that seems unending. The Guns Above, by Robyn Bennis, fictionalizes the Crimean War, pitting fictional countries against each other with dirigibles battling ground forces as well as each other. This book is notable for its attention to technical detail and realism within an alternate history framework.

  The His Dark Materials series, by Philip Pullman, uses airships not only for practical purposes, but to reveal class and character. While the rich travel in dirigibles with luxury and precision, drifting and scrappy Lee Scoresby scrapes up a living with the hot air balloon he won in a poker game. Similarly, Gail Carriger’s Finishing Schoolseries uses airships to denote the function and social class of its characters. It is set in an alternate-history Victorian school that is located in a dirigible. The mobile quality of the school allows its unusual students to participate in a large array of social functions as well as espionage and assassination activities. Teachers and their posh students live on the higher levels of an airship, but heroine Sophronia quickly explores the lower levels and makes friends with the laborers who work and live there.

  No discussion of hot air ballooning in literature can be complete without a mention of the childhood classic, The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pène du Bois, first published in 1947. In this book, balloons both hearken back to a pre-WWII way of life and forward to one of space age invention.

  The story is narrated by Professor William Sherman, who builds a balloon with the hope of spending time away from all other people. He crash lands on Krakatoa only a few days before the famous 1883 explosion, where he discovers a secret community of Americans who live in immense comfort and cooperation due to their discovery of diamond mines.

  The imagery of life on Krakatoa Island, where the books’ characters reside, is redolent of colonialism, without the ethical violations of real colonialism, since the characters live on a previously uninhabited and unowned island. The lifestyle and manners of the cha
racters are similar to those of the Edwardian upper class, but without the snobbery, as most of these characters are working-class people. The narrator’s balloon allows him to travel to a dreamy, pure, languorous existence.

  Yet, the inhabitants of Krakatoa delight in invention, especially in experimenting with electricity. And their clever, innovative balloon platform is what allows them to survive the events of the novel, bearing them inexorably into modern life. This tension between leisure and rush, a nostalgia for the past and a push for cutting edge technology, is typical of the history and the present reality of ballooning, which is currently split between gentle recreation and daring feats in the stratosphere.

  Today the fictions and adventures of ballooning continue unabated. No one has traveled to the moon in a balloon, but people have traveled to and parachuted from the stratosphere, and a joint project of NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) hopes to send a balloon to explore Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. Balloon hoaxes are still a thing, as seen in the case of the “Balloon Boy” hoax of 2009, in which a family claimed to have accidentally sent their young son up in a balloon. (He was found hiding in his own attic after a long and extensive search.) Even cats are still taking part in ballooning and parachuting in both factual instances and a wide variety of Internet hoaxes.

  I had the opportunity to take a hot air balloon ride in Napa, California in the early summer of 2020, and I can truly say I’ve never experienced anything like it. I felt safe in a way I have never felt before. I felt both calm and exhilarated. I cannot explain why the sensation of flight in a basket should be so thrilling, yet totally devoid of terror. I can only say that when the ride ended, all I wanted was to do it again. It is no surprise to me that these craft and their airship cousins thrive in the world of speculative fiction. The basket of a balloon in flight is a place where poetry and science, fate and decision, adventure and peacefulness meet.

  About the Author

  Carrie Sessarego is the resident “geek reviewer” for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, where she wrangles science fiction, fantasy romance, comics, movies, and non-fiction. Carrie’s first book, Pride, Prejudice, and Popcorn: TV and Film Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, was released in 2014. Her work has been published in Interfictions Online, Pop Matters: After the Avengers, The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 9, Invisible 3, Clarkesworld Magazine, and two volumes of Speculative Fiction: The Year’s Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary. She spends her time wrangling her husband, daughter, dog, and three cats.

  Dinosaurs and Metaphors:

  A Conversation with Sheila Williams

  Arley Sorg

  Born in Springfield, MA, Sheila Williams grew up in a family of five in western Massachusetts. Her mother had a master’s degree in microbiology; her father sparked her interest in genre fiction, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs to her. He had a membership to the Science Fiction Book Club, which delivered books every month. Once the spark caught, she read everything she could get her hands on. At the library she discovered a secret code: the books she loved had spaceships on the spines.

  Williams attended Elmira College in upstate New York. She spent a year abroad at the London School of Economics before graduating with a degree in philosophy. She earned her master’s in philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, MO.

  In 1981, Williams joined the publishing industry, starting in a subsidiary rights department. In 1982, she became an assistant at Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, where she would work with the eponymous author and editor for ten years. Williams was given more responsibilities in weeks and the managing editor title in three years. In 1992, she cofounded the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence with Rick Wilber, a project that nurtures emerging authors beyond simply handing them a prize.

  She became editor of Asimov’s in 2004 when Gardner Dozois retired. Williams has been a Hugo Award finalist for editing almost every year since 2006 and won in 2011 and 2012. The magazine won Locus Awards in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2016. In 2018, she was given SFWA’s Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award, with Gardner Dozois, “to honor their editing careers in support of science fiction and fantasy.”

  Williams has coedited many anthologies, the bulk of them collecting stories from Asimov’s, starting with Tales from Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1986 with Cynthia Manson, and including a long line of themed books with Gardner Dozois, such as 1999’s Isaac Asimov’s Werewolves. She edited Why I Left Harry’s All Night Hamburgers and Other Stories in 1990 with Charles Ardai and A Woman’s Liberation: A Choice of Futures By and About Women in 2001 with Connie Willis.

  Solo projects include Hugo and Nebula Award Winners from Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1995, Asimov’s Science Fiction: 30th Anniversary Anthology in 2007, and Enter a Future: Fantastic Tales from Asimov’s Science Fiction in 2010.

  Most recently, she’s spent time helping to arrange poetry readings for high school students at a local Barnes & Noble. “Some of the kids are nervous,” Williams says, “but I think they all benefit from having a real author’s reading experience. It’s wonderful to see how supportive they are of each other.”

  You once told me, “I love dinosaur stories!” Are there certain elements or aspects or things that the stories you love the most have in common? Or does it vary greatly depending on the story?

  I love many different kinds of stories. I do love dinosaur stories, but I also use the word as a metaphor. The “dinosaur” represents the fantastic element, be it scientific, surreal, or supernatural. I’ve read many New Yorker stories, but they don’t tend to be among my favorites. (There are exceptions, but these tend to be tales like George Saunders’ “Escape from Spiderhead.”) A story about a bad marriage, or a pedestrian neighborhood, or a claustrophobic social scene, usually needs an additional fantastic component to resonate with me. An example of this is Dale Bailey’s “Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous.” This perfect story has everything—a disintegrating marriage and depression, but also time travel and dinosaurs! My favorite stories tend to be told on multiple levels, but they are all different.

  Since you took over Asimov’s in 2004, do you feel like there are specific things about your taste in stories that have changed?

  I’ve always been open to the next new idea, the next new type of story. It’s not so much that my tastes have changed as it is that authors and their fiction are influenced by their perspectives and by changing events. New authors bring new ideas. There’s a deeper appreciation of the diverse backgrounds today’s authors bring to the field. Authors are introducing a host of fresh ideas, new storytelling techniques, new characters, new worlds.

  I’m enjoying all of it. I loved what I was buying in 2004, but I wouldn’t want to be buying the exact same material sixteen years later. Even the authors who were being published in 2004 have grown and changed, and their fiction has evolved as well. My November/December holiday cover story by Sam Schreiber (“Christmas at the Hilbert Astoria”) is probably a bit zanier than something I might have published in 2005, but it contains a lot of complex math and physics and pairs well with my new Christmas story from Connie Willis (“Take a Look at the Five and Ten”). The issue also has stories by Alaya Dawn Johnson, Chen Qiufan, Julie Novakova, and lots of other recognizable names. No two are alike!

  Even before you took over Asimov’s you had been at Analog for a number of years, and you are part of a science fiction legacy. Do you feel like genre definitions are important, are they relevant? And how do you feel about horror or dark fantasy?

  I think it’s still important that there is a form of literature that explores the effects of science and technology on our culture and looks to their effects on the future. This is a rich vein that continually gives to authors as new advancements and discoveries occur in the STEM disciplines. It is the sort of fiction that I wanted for Entanglements. Entanglements may be the first book in the Twelve Tomorrows series to address a specific theme, but all the fiction in these books has been h
ard science fiction. I publish stories like this in Asimov’s, but I’m also delighted when the lines between science fiction and fantasy and horror blur. There is a lot of room for experimentation and the blending of ideas among these related fields.

  How did the Entanglements project come about; how did it develop, and why “Entanglements” as a specific theme?

  Susan Buckley, an acquisitions editor at MIT Press, contacted me late in November 2018 to inquire if I’d be interested in editing the 2020 edition of Twelve Tomorrows. This was to be the first edition with a specific theme. She and Gideon Lichfield of MIT Technology Review had already discussed some options for the theme, but they wanted to reach the final decision with me. I thought the effect of new technology on human relationships was both an intriguing theme and one that was broad enough that authors could approach it in myriad ways.

  Did the book turn out pretty much how you’d initially envisioned it? Or are there important differences between initial concept and final product?

  The final book is full of surprises, but in the quality of writing and diversity of ideas, it’s exactly what I was hoping for. There’s a range in story length and tone. This range happened organically, but it’s an essential element of an interesting collection of tales.

  What was the editorial process like in terms of story selection and/or ToC development?

  I submitted a list of twelve to fifteen authors who I knew were capable of tackling Entanglements’ themes in creative ways. A few authors fell off the list because my editors preferred not to have any overlap with authors who had appeared in the 2018 volume of Twelve Tomorrows. A few of the remaining authors were busy with other obligations. This left me with eight authors from the original list. I suggested a couple of new names and Gideon and Susan also made some recommendations. I was extremely happy with the final table of contents.